Thinking Freedom in Africa. Michael Neocosmos
chief of ceremonies and main mediator in Mandé. He is allowed to joke with all groups, first of all with the royal family.
44.All those who transgress these rules will be punished. Everyone is bound to make effective their implementation.
NOTES
1.See the appendix to this chapter for the full text in English. The charter was orally transmitted within the hunters’ guild. For a useful account of the transmission of knowledge by the hunters of Mali, see Sedibé (2001).
2.This second document is known as the Kurukan Fuga Charter. It has recently been revived as an authentic expression of African culture, which is said to provide the basis for locating in tradition such current concerns as conflict resolution, decentralisation, environmental sustainability, and so on, in contemporary Africa, and has been promoted by various West African states and multi-state agencies. In fact, UNESCO has inscribed it on the ‘Representative List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity’. See the appendix for translations of both texts.
3.Ifi Amadiume (1995: 42) refers to West African acephalous societies as ‘anti-state decentralised political systems’, an expression which has the merit of stressing their explicit opposition to state power and not simply the absence of a state. From the evidence regarding the extent to which they went in order to secure their autonomy, it seems indeed that Amadiume’s term is applicable to these BaKongo societies.
4.‘It is more than therapeutic techniques; it is rebuilding society to make human dignity meaningful again. Lessons drawn from this process of social healing should be important for any politics of peace. Lemba was conceptualized as “mukisi wa mfunisina kanda” – “a knowledge and practice of re-peopling the clan”’ (Wamba-dia-Wamba, 2013: 15).
5.Janzen sees Lemba as gradually succumbing to the coastal slave trade in the late 19th century and to colonisation following on from it in the 20th century. Lemba survived for three centuries in this form, according to Janzen (1982: 6).
6.By ‘Kongolese’, Thornton means only those BaKongo who were subjects of the king of Kongo (1993: 185 n.17).
7.For Hallward (2004): ‘Few transformations in world history have been more momentous, few required more sacrifice or promised more hope. And few have been more forgotten by those who would have us believe that this history has since come to a desirable end with the eclipse of struggles for socialism, national liberation and meaningful independence in the developing world.’ See also Nesbitt (2008a, 2008b, 2009).
8.Law (2000: 131) insists: ‘In 1791, the insurrection of Haitian slaves was principally an African affair’ (my translation).
9.As in the work of C.L.R. James (2001), for example, which in this respect conforms to the conception of history of the time in which it was written. For an important discussion of James’s visions of emancipation and modernity, see Scott (2004).
10.I only managed to have access to Neil Roberts’s important text Freedom as Marronage (University of Chicago Press, 2015) as my book was being prepared for publication, and thus have not been able to take account of its many useful insights here.
11.When it came to women, the evidence is less clear. In France, Olympe de Gouges had affirmed the equality of women in the Revolution (see https://chnm.gmu.edu/revolution/d/293/); in the case of Saint-Domingue, Girard (2009) examines the role of women in the last two years of the struggle for independence.
12.Césaire (1981: 269) comments on Toussaint’s politics at this time: ‘The social situation was of concern? The economic situation serious? He believed he could solve everything by militarising everything’ (my translation).
13.Fick (2000: 83, my translation) notes: ‘if they had been allowed to define the word freedom, it would have signified the individual possession of small land parcels and subsistence agriculture along with the selling of the harvest on local markets rather than for export’. Such, in my terms, was their second prescription for freedom.
14.Toussaint’s ultimately failed opposition to the formation of a parcel-owning peasantry in Haiti is an extremely important issue, for it illustrates the political gulf which had developed between him (and the other leaders) on the one hand and the ex-slaves on the other. The latter were predominantly African-born, but this fact, along with the fact that Toussaint was a Creole, cannot account either for the insistence by the people on forming a parcel-owning peasantry or for the leaders’ resistance to it. Nesbitt (following Madison Smartt Bell, Toussaint’s biographer) wants to use Toussaint’s identity to account for his politics. He asserts (p. 168) that he was not African-born and that the demand for land tenure reform was African in inspiration. First, it is important to note that the land tenure system set up in Haiti was never African; there is no parcel-owning peasantry in Africa, but land is held by the community and not individually owned; private ownership exists but is rare in African tenurial systems. Neither is the minifundia system in Latin America or the mir in Russia (both of which are used by Nesbitt) an adequate empirical analogy, as in either case peasants were bound to a landlord class. The parcel-owning system was a novelty invented in Haiti. Parcel-owning without overlords is a peasant political prescription, some would say utopia, for it tends to lead to inequalities developing, as some peasants accumulate at the expense of others. The Haitian land tenure system seems to have been a successful attempt to actualise such a system and to maintain a relative equality by putting cultural obstacles in the way of individual accumulation, and it was these that were inspired by African customs, according to Fick (1990: 181) and Barthélemy (1990, 2000). What was African, then, was not the land tenure system as such, but the cultural restrictions on peasant class differentiation. This suggests a strong political commitment to egalitarianism. Second, to maintain that Toussaint opposed this set-up and insisted on a plantation system because he was Creole and had not experienced Africa, ultimately depoliticises Toussaint’s decisions in favour of a psychological account of his politics and by reference to his social location, although we have been told that his principled fidelity to a politics of humanity contradicted his social location (e.g. as an ex-slave-owner himself) (see Césaire, 1981: 243). Toussaint, we are told, was African enough to speak his father’s African language, to be a knowledgeable herbalist and to run a palaver. So why would he not be African on the question of land? The account should rather begin from his subjective politics. Toussaint was an assimilé – he could not envisage independence from France and he was enough of a modernist to be a Freemason, which suggests a fetishism of technical progress. Of course, a plantation system at the time would seem technically more ‘advanced’ than a peasant parcel. After all, this is what all states (probably without exception) have maintained ever since. And this is the point: Toussaint’s politics at this time were state politics. James (2001: 200) notes that ‘Toussaint knew the backwardness of the labourers, he made them work, but he wanted to see them civilised and advanced in culture’. Toussaint had clearly lost confidence in the masses, but it was also clear that his fidelity to morality and the law made him unable to listen to the people, let alone to be convinced by them. Given his position of power in the state and his desire to maintain an ‘efficient economy’ in the conceptions of the time, it is not surprising that he should insist on (and violently impose) his view of the superiority of the plantation system, however exploitative it may have been. This had less to do with his identity and more with the limited nature of his politics. He became hopelessly out of touch with the democratic aspirations of the masses. This is arguably a general problem with charismatic leadership, which largely conforms to a form of state leadership. As a political figure, Toussaint is very reminiscent of Mandela in many respects.
15.In so far as independent leaders who were close to the masses are concerned, of particular importance is the figure of Colonel Sans-Souci, on whom see Trouillot (1995). Trouillot notes that such rebel leaders were primarily African-born bossales as opposed to locally born créoles. Sans-Souci was from Congo; he was assassinated by Henri (later King) Christophe.
16.A point, incidentally, with which Césaire agreed (1981: 269ff).
17.See Kautsky (1899). This argument was vehemently opposed by Lenin in his analyses of the ‘agrarian question’ in Russia,